Mur
***/**** Image A- Sound A-
directed by Simone Bitton
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Wall's greatest strength–its serene pictorialism–is also its greatest limitation. On the one hand, the film asks us to think long and hard about the sheer presence of the massive concrete edifice designed to keep terrorists out of Israel and whether that presence is necessary. To that end, it features some skilful photography of the towering edifice in all its intrusive glory. On the other hand, Wall pushes the surrounding populace onto an abstract plane, letting the Kafkaesque spectacle drive the movie when really it ought to be providing more, pardon the pun, concrete information. It's a tough call, as the film manages to gently grip instead of blind with the alienating rage the subject understandably attracts–it gets you to listen, but at the expense of a certain kind of perspective. Still, considering the passionate hysteria this topic usually incites, perhaps it's offering a necessary stretch of distance.
The wall is, as it turns out, an irresistible camera subject–especially if you're a metaphorically-minded filmmaker like Simone Bitton. She starts things off with a sucker punch, panning across the beautiful murals that adorn the Israeli stretch in one section while asking us to consider what these gorgeous pictures obscure. Most of the time, Bitton is content to mine the wall for its brute, mute authority, and with good reason: it's the dominant presence where it falls not just because it stands so tall. Palestinian residents of the expropriated land complain that the wall separates them from their property–like the farmer who lost a sizeable amount of his crops. To them, the wall is a covert attempt to drive them from their homes, transforming the wall tableaux into ominous testament to their trauma.
But the omnipresence of the wall (in the film, that is) keeps us from getting a fix on Bitton's interview subjects. Though she's passionately anti-wall (despite the DVD liner notes' claim of "even-handedness"), she can't make it conceptually disappear long enough to devote her full attention to the ideals of her talking heads. The words of the weary Palestinian victims and assorted Jewish dissenters don't land with the impact they should because the wall is practically all we ever see. One could argue that this is the point: the movie gives aesthetic presence to the structure's actual effects, prompting us to wonder what might happen if we were faced with a monolithic slab as part of our daily lives. But it also gives the wall too much dominion and its subjects too little, reducing their sentiments to flyspecks on a windshield.
I say this as a disclaimer, not as a dismissal. The film does an excellent job of outlining its case and illustrating the intense discomfort (and outright hardship) caused by the titular barricade, and it offers this with an eloquence that wouldn't be possible in a more cinema vérité format. I applaud the filmmakers' attempts to evoke something other than a scatter of angry footage, I merely wish that Wall had effaced the wall as much as it represented it–that is, had used it as something other than the centre of attention, which pushes the more pressing subject of its victims to the mental margins.
THE DVD
Life Size renders this documentary as well as can be expected on DVD. The 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer has been sourced from fairly crisp digital video; colours don't leap out, but that's due in no small part to the depicted milieu. The Dolby 2.0 stereo sound is similarly adequate, if not terribly complex in its channel separation. There are no extras, not even a trailer.
97 minutes; NR; 1.78:1 (16×9-enhanced); French DD 2.0 (Stereo); English (optional) subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Life Size
